doomed.  Most of us have gone through that, the Millevoye phase, but who else has shown such a wise and gay acceptance of the apparently inevitable?  We parted; I remember little of our converse, except a shrewd and hearty piece of encouragement given me by my junior, who already knew so much more of life than his senior will ever do.  For he ran forth to embrace life like a lover:  his motto was never Lucy Ashton’s—­

   “Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
   Easy live and quiet die.”

Mr. Stevenson came presently to visit me at Oxford.  I make no hand of reminiscences; I remember nothing about what we did or said, with one exception, which is not going to be published.  I heard of him, writing essays in the Portfolio and the Cornhill, those delightful views of life at twenty-five, so brave, so real, so vivid, so wise, so exquisite, which all should know.  How we looked for “R.  L. S.” at the end of an article, and how devout was our belief, how happy our pride, in the young one!

About 1878, I think (I was now a slave of the quill myself), I received a brief note from Mr. Stevenson, introducing to me the person whom, in his essay on his old college magazine, he called “Glasgow Brown.”  What his real name was, whence he came, whence the money came, I never knew.  G. B. was going to start a weekly Tory paper.  Would I contribute?  G. B. came to see me.  Mr. Stevenson has described him, not as I would have described him:  like Mr. Bill Sikes’s dog, I have the Christian peculiarity of not liking dogs “as are not of my breed.”  G. B.’s paper, London, was to start next week.  He had no writer of political leading articles.  Would I do a “leader”?  But I was not in favour of Lord Lytton’s Afghan policy.  How could I do a Tory leader?  Well, I did a neutral-tinted thing, with citations from Aristophanes!  I found presently some other scribes for G. B.

What a paper that was!  I have heard that G. B. paid in handfuls of gold, in handfuls of bank-notes.  Nobody ever read London, or advertised in it, or heard of it.  It was full of the most wonderfully clever verses in old French forms.  They were (it afterwards appeared) by Mr. W. E. Henley.  Mr. Stevenson himself astonished and delighted the public of London (that is, the contributors) by his “New Arabian Nights.”  Nobody knew about them but ourselves, a fortunate few.  Poor G. B. died and Mr. Henley became the editor.  I may not name the contributors, the flower of the young lions, elderly lions now, there is a new race.  But one lion, a distinguished and learned lion, said already that fiction, not essay, was Mr. Stevenson’s field.  Well, both fields were his, and I cannot say whether I would be more sorry to lose Virginibus Puerisque and “Studies of Men and Books,” or “Treasure Island” and “Catriona.”  With the decease of G. B., Pactolus dried up in its mysterious sources, London struggled and disappeared.